Learn Everything Else

Specific Language Resources for other Languages

In general, you’re looking for a way to learn the correct pronunciation of the language, its alphabet (if necessary), a good grammar book, and a good vocabulary book. Once you’re further along, you’ll need another grammar book and some reading material for fun. I’m using this page to store resources for other languages as I get them. I’ll be expanding this page on a semi-regular basis and moving languages to their own pages as I research more resources. Remember, I’ve made a base vocabulary list of 625 words to start you off! As I talk about in that article, I find it easiest to translate those words using the short dictionaries at the end of a Lonely Planet Phrasebook; they’re cheap, short and give you good, standard translations for your words (just ignore the ridiculous pronunciation guides). Later, when you’re ready for sentences, you can go back to your phrasebook and grab some. After that, try some of these resources:

Learn Czech

Routledge Frequency Dictionary: Reviewers note that there’s no phonetic information in this dictionary, which means you’ll have to get it elsewhere.

Learn Dutch

Neri Rook has created a neat set of sentences, which are ranked based upon how frequently the words within those sentences show up within the language, then created Anki decks to store them, with Text-to-Speech recordings of each sentence and translations. They’re a nice resource to mine for useful content; I’d suggest finishing the 625, then looking through them in order for new words or new grammatical constructions, and then learning those new chunks via New Word cards, New Word Form cards and Word Order cards.

Learn Greek

A great resource where you can type in English, using your keyboard, and it will translate into Greek

Learn Hindi

A reader recommended the book for Hindi by Living Language, especially for grammar. Another reader spoke highly of this site, particularly for ear training and writing the Devanagari script.

Learn Bosnian

Learn Mongolian

A reader suggested that anyone interested in learning Mongolian could make minimal pair audio flashcards from the material in this collection of videos posted on The Mongolist.

Learn Mandarin

A reader suggested the following two resources: The Chairman’s Bao, a simplified Chinese newspaper for those learning Mandarin, and Mandarin Companion, which provides easy-to-read novels in Chinese.

Learn Tamil

One of our wonderful readers got the base word list translated into Tamil. Check it out here. He was also able to get a list of the verbs conjugated for first person singular in past, present, and future tense; take a look. And, to top it off, he made a Tamil pronunciation trainer!

Learn Latin

A reader recommended Practice Makes Perfect Basic Latin (McGraw/Hill) and Wheelock’s Latin 7th Edition, by Frederic Wheelock and Richard LaFleur. She said the latter gives a great history of the language at the beginning.

Learn Swedish

Neri Rook has created a neat set of sentences, which are ranked based upon how frequently the words within those sentences show up within the language, then created Anki decks to store them, with Text-to-Speech recordings of each sentence and translations. They’re a nice resource to mine for useful content; I’d suggest finishing the 625, then looking through them in order for new words or new grammatical constructions, and then learning those new chunks via New Word cards, New Word Form cards and Word Order cards.

Learn Turkish

Neri Rook has created a neat set of sentences, which are ranked based upon how frequently the words within those sentences show up within the language, then created Anki decks to store them, with Text-to-Speech recordings of each sentence and translations. They’re a nice resource to mine for useful content; I’d suggest finishing the 625, then looking through them in order for new words or new grammatical constructions, and then learning those new chunks via New Word cards, New Word Form cards and Word Order cards.

Learn Polish

Neri Rook has created a neat set of sentences, which are ranked based upon how frequently the words within those sentences show up within the language, then created Anki decks to store them, with Text-to-Speech recordings of each sentence and translations. They’re a nice resource to mine for useful content; I’d suggest finishing the 625, then looking through them in order for new words or new grammatical constructions, and then learning those new chunks via New Word cards, New Word Form cards and Word Order cards.

Since we have reached our 850K stretch goal, we will have support for all languages on our app. This will probably not come to our trainers and word lists very soon, since our main focus right now is the application.

Hello Hillary,
I too would be interested in book recommendations for Indonesian.
The population of Indonesia is over 260 million, and many people are interested in learning the language. If Indonesian had currently been offered, I would have purchased the full fluency option in the current Kickstarter campaign. I’m hoping Indonesian could be nudged up the priority list! 🙂

Hello! Obviously, you don’t have Danish available yet, but I’d love to see a few resources on that if it’s ever possible. A pronunciation guide/trainer, in particular, would be helpful, as I find the pronunciation very difficult and can’t seem to locate a teaching tool that works for me. Thanks!

Hi Christina,
Thank you for your comment! We don’t have any concrete plans for Danish right now, but I will add it to our list of language suggestions.
Thank you for the idea!
Best wishes,
Hillary
Fluent Forever Team

Hi there,
I’ve just finish reading the book in one setting – couldn’t put it down.
Thank you soooo much for publishing it.
I’m a native German speaker and absorbed English during 11 years living in Wales/UK.
Now I want to lern Esperanto – do you have any sugggestions for resources?
Keep up your good work and thanks again!
Kind regards
Evelin

Thanks for reaching out, and for your support! It’s great you wish to learn Esperanto. While we don’t have any resources for it, I recommend reaching out in one of our forums to see if there are other language learners working on learning Esperanto. You can get to the forums here: https://fluent-forever.com/forum/

Thanks for reaching out! While we don’t have any Danish resources right now, I recommend reaching out on our language learning forums for them. You can reach our forums here: https://fluent-forever.com/forum/

I’m also interested in Croatian though I’ll also look at the Bosnian list as it’s a close Slavic cousin! (My husband is Croatian and am working on learning so I can speak with him and natives on our trip this fall!). This book is a wonderful start for strategies to learn languages efficiently!

I just saw your indiegogo campaign for the Fluent Forever app and I’m HOOKED. I already know Dutch, English, French and a bit of Bulgarian and Swedish, but I’m also I’m interested in Korean, Icelandic and the Polynesian languages. Once I graduate and have a job, I’d be very interested in getting a lifetime account for all languages, especially if the languages I mentioned will all be available (I know Korean is already included). As a translator, it’d be a great asset to have some truly exotic languages under my belt 🙂

Thank you for your message.
Norwegian is not a language we will be adding any time soon.
But since we met our 850K stretch goal for the app we have added the learn any language feature.
This means that any language that you can think of will be in that part of the app.
It will be community based and monitored by us.

So we will not be making the materials, you will, but we will monitor the progress and
make sure everything is correct and fitting our model and method.

In a way… I feel that section of the app might be better in the end than what we will be creating

We have had many requests for it and are definitely looking into it.
But for now, we first need the app to be a stable product.
After that we can go ahead and look at what we wil be adding to it.
For ASL the entire interface has to change, so this is a big project that we want to dedicate ourselves to if we do take it on, and not just spend some time creating something that is not optimal.

Of course your book focuses on native English speakers learning other languages but as a German native speaker and teacher, I would be very interested in any hints on resources for English as a second language if you have any!

Besides the languages we have promised in our IndieGoGo campaign, there will not be any additions any time soon.

Bahasa is also not a language we will be adding any time soon.
But since we met our 850K stretch goal we have added the learn any language feature.
This means that any language that you can think of will be in that part of the app.
It will be community based and monitored by us.

So we will not be making the materials, you will, but we will monitor the progress and
make sure everything is correct and fitting our model and method.